Sophie Gray
Local Journalism Initiative
The Osoyoos Indian Band is engaging youth by using contests to promote getting out on the land and connecting with family and the community.
Sonya Jensen is the Osoyoos Indian Band (OIB) youth coordinator who came up with the idea to post activities on the community Facebook page for youth to complete. Each time a youth from the community completes a challenge, their names are put into a draw for a gift card.
“I’d seen a contest online for the Okanagan Nation Alliance and they had an outdoor activity using the language kind of thing. So I started off with that and other ideas came to me,” said Jensen.
The first contest encouraged the youth to use their knowledge of the language to get out on the land and complete a scavenger hunt. They were asked to take photos along the way and post them to the Facebook page to show that they’d completed the challenge. This is the way she’s running the three times weekly challenge.
“I put up the challenge in the morning and then I give them the day to do the activity, whatever it is,” she said. “And then in the evening, then I take all the names of the kids that participated and I do a draw.”
Each time she posts, the challenge is different but she tries to focus each activity around either getting outside, connecting with family, or something a youth can do on their own. So far, she’s asked youth to cook for their families, make videos or write poetry. She’s also had help from others in the community calling in with suggestions.
Youth and school aged children are isolated from their usual support groups and peers while schools remain closed, so as the youth programs coordinator Jensen came up with the challenges as a way to keep kids connected, even when they can’t physically be together.
“We wanted to stay connected to the kids and just, you know, share support with them that this is kind of difficult times right now but we can still do things together, but apart,” she said.
So far, the challenges have seen anywhere from two to nine kids participating and competing for the gift cards. Jensen has had to pair the challenges back from daily to three times a week though, because the gift cards, she said, are getting expensive.
“Whoever wants to do it that day just joins in. It’s not, like, mandatory to do,” said Jensen. “We did shorten it to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It gets kind of expensive to continually get gift cards.”
Jensen started posting the challenges on March 31, and plans to keep doing it as long as the money for prizes and the willingness to participate continues.
